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JN was funded by a fellowship from the French MENESR.Peer reviewedPeer Reviewe

Organic agriculture and climate change mitigation - A report of the Round Table on Organic Agriculture and Climate Change

Summary and next steps Participants of the workshop were able to draw from their discussions and from the input of guest speakers and synthesize a set of conclusions that can be used to guide future activities concerning LCAs and other activities that seek to identify and quantify the potential contributions of organic agriculture to climate change mitigation. - LCA is the best tool for measuring GHG emissions related to agricultural products. - There is a risk of oversimplification when focusing on climate change as a single environmental impact category. - Farm production and transport (at least for plant products) are important hotspots for agricultural products. - Studies have shown no remarkable difference in GHG emissions between organic and conventional but, traditionally, soil carbon changes have not been included – which can have a major impact, especially for plant products. - The challenges of LCA of organic products – accounting for carbon sequestration and interactions in farming systems, including the environmental costs of manure – need to be addressed. - Attempts should be made to secure a consistent LCA methodology for agricultural products, including organic products

Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target